Bu Shi: The Lighthouse

SARAHCROWN is pleased to announce the first solo show of Chinese artist Bu Shi (1993, CH). The exhibition will present a selection of brand new works that deal with the psychological architecture built to survive bodily vulnerability—how rational control, emotional withdrawal, and avoidance create a boundary between self and world, and how recognizing that structure becomes the first step toward dissolving it.

A lighthouse is a structure built against uncertainty. It stands at the margins: on rocky coasts, remote beaches, solitary islands. It is both practical and symbolic—an architecture of guidance, a promise that somewhere in the darkness there is a point of reference. In Bu Shi’s work, however, the lighthouse never appears. It remains absent, a metaphor rather than an image. What we encounter instead are landscapes that seem suspended between dusk and dream, spaces where the sea, the night, and the solitary figure dissolve into one another. The lighthouse becomes a distant possibility: a light we sense but cannot see.

Bu Shi often works on small-scale canvases. His muted, time-worn palette recalls antique jewelry—delicate, luminous, and marked by use. The discipline of seal engraving and calligraphy, which blossomed during his formative years, remains foundational to his visual language. Precision of line and a sensitivity to rhythm shape compositions that feel both intimate and ceremonial.

Living in Italy, Bu Shi frequently draws upon primordial memories and layered cultural references. Occult objects—candles, skulls, eggs—appear as enigmatic keys that connect the present with figures of the past. Through them, the artist probes questions of identity and inheritance: those cultural structures we inhabit yet never entirely choose. Only in the face of the occult, Bu Shi suggests, can we briefly dissociate from these frameworks—or illuminate them.

The paintings in The Lighthouse are magnetic and contemplative, imbued with surreal and occasionally baroque details. Lush, seemingly tranquil landscapes or altarpiece-like arrangements quietly conceal autobiographical elements, including recurring self-portraits. Moths drift through the compositions, subtle emissaries of the night and a reflection of the time the artist prefers to work—when the world falls silent and forms emerge from darkness.

The works in this exhibition are all brand new. This new series introduces a deeper chromatic atmosphere: dark reds, ochres, and blues suffuse the canvases like the fading light of dusk over water. Bu Shi’s handling of illumination—unnatural, almost theatrical—creates subtle dissonances within otherwise calm scenes. Shapes appear half-recognizable, as if glimpsed in the brief moment between sleep and waking.

In these scattered dissonances, something quietly mystical surfaces. The viewer senses the presence of a distant beacon: not a literal lighthouse, but the human impulse behind it. To build structures that guide us, to seek light while surrounded by night, to navigate across the vast and unknowable ocean of experience.

The Lighthouse is thus both a place and a condition—a poetic reflection on solitude, orientation, and longing. Like the coastal towers that inspired its title, the exhibition invites viewers to pause in search for a point of light.